collinfunk

We also test GNU coreutils on macOS. It is a bit tricky since the other maintainers and I don't own any macOS machines for testing. But we seem to do well enough with a shared system that Adélie Linux kindly allows the compile farm [1] to use, along with some additional CI machines.

Linux has FICLONE [1], which I prefer because it operates on two file descriptors, allowing you to safely modify file metadata after the fact. macOS has clonefile, clonefileat, and fclonefileat [2]. Sadly, there is no way to operate on two file descriptors. The best you get is fclonefileat, which operates on a source file descriptor. Solaris has reflink and reflinkat, which operate on two paths, the latter relative to file descriptors [3]. In that case, one needs to be careful opening the destination to make changes to the metadata.

GNU coreutils has support for reflinks on Linux and macOS. But I've been thinking about adding support for Solaris as of late [4]. Sadly, I don't use it enough to test it as much as I would like.

Hopefully, a few years down the line the interfaces converge, and it is as simple as hard linking.

The oldest version on the GNU ftp server is fileutils-3.13 [1]. I vaguely remember having some links to older versions, probably somewhere in my archived mail. But I don't remember if it was fileutils-3.9 or earlier.

I co-maintain GNU coreutils, so I am interested in reading them. If you have them, you can email me privately or on the public mailing list. Both are listed on the homepage [2].

When you say that no one bothered to do this testing until uutils existed, it feels like you are discrediting our work. Any other implementation is free to use our test suite, as long as they respect its licensing. Doing so is relatively straightforward; you just need to point a shell variable to the place with the just-built binaries.

Note that the man pages are a quick reference explaining the options. A lot of gotchas and further explanations are located in the texinfo manual, which is over 300 pages in PDF form [1]. If you notice areas where it could be improved, I would be happy to review your bug report sent to [email protected].

    Shamefully, the inetutils project hasn’t actually released a fixed version of their software (at least at the time of publishing).

Perhaps I am just unlucky in my interactions, but I feel like this entitlement is too common among software security people. Note that I see zero return in spending time working on Inetutils, and I find other projects I work on more interesting.